The company Territorium Life, a company that offers technological solutions for educational purposes, has been the latest to face the repercussions after the entrance exam to the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) was tainted by a massive fraud scandal. The institution’s lawyer, Hugo Concha Cantú, announced this Wednesday the legal reprisals and judicial measures that will be taken after the incident, including the early termination of the contract they had with this company. “A specialized company will be appointed to carry out a technological audit that performs a detailed audit of the platform and the system it comprises,” he assured.
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Concha also announced a review of the contracting process of Territorium Life, which has several contracts with different government agencies. UNAM had contracted the technological services of the Mexican company for 36 million pesos (more than two million dollars), which promised a shielded process with AI to prevent fraud. Now, the university will seek to assign responsibilities, and the rector, Leonardo Lomelí Vanegas, has requested the Superior Audit Office of the Federation to carry out control over the contracting process.
The last entrance exam held this summer was the first to apply the online and remote exam modality instead of the traditional in-person one. The university sought to digitize a process that calls about 130,000 applicants seeking to access a public bachelor’s degree, aiming to save human and economic resources. However, while in previous years barely 3% scored over 100 correct answers (out of 120), this time it shot up to 16%, raising suspicion of widespread cheating during the test despite the different control mechanisms established to supervise it. At the start of the test, the software validated the applicant’s identity by verifying that the examinee’s face matches that of an official ID. Applicants also had to install software that locks computers during exams. The browser only allows moving forward and backward, prevents access to other programs such as messaging apps, and copying, pasting, or screenshot functions are disabled. Additionally, there was remote monitoring of one person for every 150 applicants.
